20 Years Later, Poverty Is Up, but Architects of 'Welfare Reform' Have No Regrets

People wait in line for new shoes and school supplies at a charity event at
Fred Jordan Mission in Skid Row area of Los Angeles. (photo: Mark
Ralston/AFP/Getty)

20
Years Later, Poverty Is Up, but Architects of 'Welfare Reform' Have No Regrets

By Zaid Jilani, The
Intercept

25 August 16

A gathering
Monday in Washington, D.C., featured a bipartisan group of former government
officials agreeing on the benefits of slashing the nation’s safety net.

This
week marks the 20th anniversary of “welfare reform,” the 1996
law passed by Congress and administered by President Bill Clinton that strictly
limited the amount of federal cash assistance that the poorest Americans can
receive — transforming the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program
into the more restrictive Temporary Aid for Needy Families.

One of
the main impacts of the law was to help double the number of
American households living in extreme poverty in America – defined as living on
less than $2 a day.

The
Capitol Hill event, hosted by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute
and the Progressive Policy Institute, which has been referred to as President
Bill Clinton’s “idea mill,” celebrated the 20th anniversary of the law.
Its architects said they had no regrets about its passage.

Former
Michigan Republican governor John Engler, who pioneered state-level welfare
cutbacks and who today serves as the head of the corporate lobbying group the
Business Roundtable, recounted how Bill Clinton’s support helped make national
welfare reform possible.

“It
was pretty stunning in 1992 to have a Democratic candidate for president,
albeit a 12-year veteran in the governor’s office talking about ending ‘welfare
as we know it,’” he said. “That was a pretty decisive moment.”

Right-wing
praise for Bill Clinton was a reoccurring theme at the event. Robert Rector, a
Heritage Foundation scholar who has been dubbed the “intellectual godfather” of welfare reform,
claimed that Clinton took up the same cause as Ronald Reagan, allowing him to
outmaneuver George W.H. Bush. “In my perspective that’s the issue that put
Clinton in the White House in ’93,” Rector said.

Thompson,
who had served as another welfare reform pioneer when he was the Republican
governor of Wisconsin, was unrepentant about the impact of the welfare
overhaul.

“It
did work,” he said. “Poverty went down and more people are working.”

Not
everyone agrees with this rosy assessment, however. Luke Shaefer, a University
of Michigan Social Work professor and one of the researchers who documented the
rise in extreme poverty since the passage of welfare reform, told The
Intercept that the claims of reduction in poverty and increase in
employment were more true up until 2000. “Single moms did go to work, but it is
unclear if welfare reform had much to do with it,” he said. The Earned Income
Tax Credit “expansion is much more clearly important. And we know that the moms
who left welfare were not any better off for it, and in some cases a lot worse
off.”

Shaefer
worked with sociologist Kathryn Edin on a
book released last year that found before welfare reform, more
than a million households with children were being kept out of extreme poverty
thanks to federal assistance. By 2011, that had dropped to about 300,000. The
researchers estimated that 1.5 million American households, including 3 million
children, are today living at or below extreme poverty – double the number that
it was in 1996.

Shaefer
points to research from Jim Ziliak, a prominent economist who studied the issue
for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Taken together, the results from
leaver studies, demonstrations, and from national samples suggest that many
women were worse off financially after welfare reform,” he writes. “Especially at the bottom of the
distribution.”

Yet
those deemed most vulnerable had little representation at the event. Of 19
invited speakers, just two were women.

Bruce
Reed, one of Bill Clinton’s chief domestic policy advisers and the man behind
the former president’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” conceded that more
remains to be done for the working poor, but told The Intercept that
welfare reform was overall a “success.”

In
fact, the latest numbers from
the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement found that 5.5 percent
of American households — 6.7 million households in all — used a food bank or
some other form of food charity in 2014. That’s the highest percentage since
record-keeping on the matter began in 1995.

Despite
the reforms, the stigma of receiving government assistance remains — and
opponents of aid to the needy continue to demonize the remaining programs, such
as food stamps. Maine’s Republican Governor Paul Lepage recently claimed that
food stamp recipients in his state are on a “steady diet of Mars bars and
Mountain Dew.”

At the
conclusion of the event, the speakers and audience were treated to a reception
featuring alcoholic drinks, cheesecake squares, specialty meats, and gourmet
cheese.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs